Systems and methods for automated extraction of closed captions in real time or near real-time and tagging of streaming data for advertisements

ABSTRACT

System and methods for finding and accessing desired audio content from audio content sources, including means and methods for extracting captions from a broadcast; aggregating the captions in a database; indexing the database content; searching the captions for a mention of at least one target; analyzing the results for desired content; indexing into the database to extract the desired content; thereby providing a method for quickly finding and accessing desired audio and video content from a large number of sources.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

The present invention is related to the following co-pending application: it claims priority from and is a continuation-in-part of U.S. non-provisional patent application Ser. No. 12/967,135 filed Dec. 14, 2010, which claims the benefit of U.S. provisional patent application Ser. No. 61/287,868 filed Dec. 18, 2009, both of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

1. Field of the Invention

The present invention relates generally to electronic data streaming management. Further, the present invention relates to automated real time or near real time extraction of closed captions systems and methods relating thereto, and more particularly to advertisement video closed captioning. Near real-time extraction is extraction that is initiated during the broadcast whereas real-time extraction has no time delay.

2. Description of the Prior Art

Many TV broadcasts and owners of video content enable users to see complete segments of a TV program or partial segments of a TV program. While this is usually sufficient for an individual with access to a high speed device, the individual can only ‘see’ and ‘listen’ to one channel at a time and sometimes to several. There is no ability for an individual or organization to monitor in real time dozens or hundreds of TV channels for particular keywords, concepts or phrases (words of interest (WOI)) and be alerted of the occurrence of those words, browse for WOI, search to any WOI and persist the WOI over a long period of time. Further, there is a need to be able to deliver the WOI over a lower speed network, such as a telephone provider's network, in increasing bandwidth without clogging the network infrastructure.

There also remains a need for automated systems and methods for encoding and embedding tag(s) associated with data streams for providing search capability of the data streams.

Relevant prior art US patents and published pending US patent applications include the following:

U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,859,662, 5,481,296, 6266094; US Pub. Nos. 20080313146 and 20030221198 relate to extracting captions from video broadcasts.

U.S. Pat. No. 5,859,662 and US Pub. No. 20090049481 relate to extracting captions in real time.

U.S. Pat. No. 7,518,657 relates to storing captions on a device or pushing to a cloud.

U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,859,662 and 6,266,094 relate to providing alerts based upon key words.

U.S. Pat. No. 5,481,296 relates to providing alerts based upon concepts of interest.

U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,580,437 and 6,798,912 relate to creating an index of video segments based upon caption information.

U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,859,662, 7,467,398, 5,561,457; US Pub. Nos. 20070027844, 20080313146, 20090049481, and 20030093814 relate to viewing indexed video or audio based on caption searches.

U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,859,662, 5,481,296 relate to software for an end user for the related technology; and US Pub. No. 20030192050 relates to software for broadcast location.

U.S. Pat. No. 6,457,010 relates to storing information about a user's profile.

U.S. Pat. No. 7,210,157; US Pub. Nos. 20070300250 and 20030221198 relate to allowing for finding media based on a user's profile.

In addition to the patent references listed hereinabove, it is known in the art to provide for free and licensed applications that allow individuals to record and extract CC of completed recordings. These applications are typically located at the end-user's premise, provide for a limited number of channel recordings and provide limited database and search capabilities. Most of these applications are aimed at providing traditional Personal Video Recording (PVR) functionality such as record this program at this time on this channel. Some allow for added features such as limited keyword searches of extracted captions and only of recordings in the format of the vendor of the TV tuner. All of them enable extraction after the broadcasts have been recorded and not while the broadcasts are in progress.

Open-Source close caption (CC) extraction applications include:

a) The SCC Tools package consists of ten command-line tools (and one General Parser module) designed to assist in the task of extracting, manipulating, and inserting the additional data included in Line 21 of NTSC video: closed captions, MSNTV links, V-Chip ratings, and a variety of lesser-used types of information. http://www.geocities.com/mcpoodle43/SCC_TOOLS/DOCS/SCC_TOOLS.HTML#CCExtra ct

b) MPG2SRT—MPG2SRT is a standalone program to extract closed captioning data embedded within an MPEG2 file. The extracted captions can be saved in an .srt format for use with directvobsub or similar application, or as a .SAMI file for use with Windows Media Player. http://www.htpctools.com/mpg2srt/

c) http://ccextractor.sourceforge.net/ccextractorfor_windows.html

There are companies that provide (fee or free) PVR or DVR functionality software. All provide the basic and/or enhanced PVR or DVR capabilities and some provide extended capabilities. Some features include: pause, rewind, fast-forward live; record all favorite TV shows by name; and integrated TV guide (provided by the DVR software). Some companies providing commercially available products or services at the time of the present invention include:

a) Microsoft MediaCenter—allows for recording of selected channels at particular times and all of the traditional PVR functionality

b) SnapStream Personal and Enterprise edition products are the most advanced. The products are able to capture, index and extract captions and alert users based on keywords. The application is aimed at an individual (personal device) or an organization and is bundled with its own hardware and software. A full description of the capability of the device is: http://www.snapstream.com/enterprise/features.asp

c) ATI Multi-Media Center (http://ati.amd.com/products/multimediacenter/features.html) allows the user to record and search the Closed Caption text during TV-on-Demand™ sessions and is limited to the number of tuners in the user's system. Creation and delivery of alerts are limited

d) SageTV (http://sagetv.com/stvfeatures.html?sageSub=tv) offers many features of an advanced PVR and DVR

e) MythTV(www.mythtv.org) is a Free Open Source software digital video recorder (DVR) project distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. It has been under heavy development since 2002, and now contains most features one would expect from a good DVR.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

A first aspect of the present invention is to provide methods and systems to extract in real time or near real-time captions from Video broadcasts that have Closed Captions (CC), extract encoded near real-time advertisements, provide alerts based on keywords or concepts of interest, extract parts or entire audio from a video broadcast, search captions and enable users to index into the video or audio segments that are relevant to the captions, view or listen to the search results, assemble a ‘personal’ audio and video of the results into a personalized clip and run the environment in a distributed or centralized manner as a dedicated environment or a service environment. This capability can be in a general or dedicated device such as a PC or embedded in a device such as a TV tuner, PVR or DVR or any intelligent computing device, including SOC and mobile devices. Near real-time extraction is extraction that is initiated during the broadcast whereas real-time extraction has no time delay.

A second aspect of the present invention is to provide systems and methods to encode and embed a stream of bits that represent an Advertisement Tag Code (ATC) for providing automatic electronic methods for collecting data about at least one ATC and correlate collected data with additional sources of data. The ATC may be encrypted or un-encrypted. Benefits of methods and system of the present invention for applications in advertising include providing a campaign manager capabilities to monitor automatically and electronically the effectiveness of a particular advertising campaign, the occurrence of ‘earned media’ relevant to the campaign and to correlate such campaign with traditional print media, internet media, social media and mobile media campaigns. The ATC is placed in the VBI or closed captioned stream of a broadcast TV channel, or in a live Internet video stream. While other systems exist for tagging advertisements such as Ad-ID, the present system and method provide for an open and widely available service that does not rely on a central authority to design and distribute the advertisement TAG for any content. For example, an ATC may be inserted into a data stream to enable users to automatically link to a company's web site for a particular product or particular campaign. Such an ATC would therefore facilitate the integration of any content from the live broadcast to any other content (web logs, web pages, phone logs, etc.) for the purpose of producing deeper analytics about the effectiveness of the message; whether it is ad campaign-related or otherwise.

These and other aspects of the present invention will become apparent to those skilled in the art after a reading of the following description of the preferred embodiment when considered with the drawings, as they support the claimed invention.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 illustrates a schematic view of one embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 2 illustrates a schematic view of another embodiment of the present invention.

FIGS. 3-12 illustrate screen shots of various graphic user interfaces for an interactive website according to one embodiment of the present invention.

FIG. 3 shows an interface for retrieving captions for a specific show.

FIG. 4 shows an interface for retrieving captions for a specific date and time for the show selected in FIG. 3.

FIG. 5 shows an interface for searching shows.

FIG. 6 shows an interface for displaying query results.

FIG. 7 shows an interface for searching for advertisements subscriptions.

FIG. 8 shows an interface for displaying query results in a time sequence.

FIG. 9 shows an interface for displaying query results by show with count, including a graph display.

FIG. 10 is the graph of FIG. 9, enlarged for better visibility of details.

FIG. 11 is an interface for displaying query results with a table and graph showing query hits and count according to channel.

FIG. 12 is another table and graph showing query hits and count according to channel.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

Referring now to the drawings in general, the illustrations are for the purpose of describing a preferred embodiment of the invention and are not intended to limit the invention thereto.

Near Real-Time Extraction

The present invention also provides methods and systems for extracting near real-time captions from Video broadcasts that have Closed Captions (CC), extract in near real-time encoded advertisements or targeted content, provide alerts based on keywords or concepts of interest, extract parts or entire audio from a video broadcast, search captions and enable users to index into the video or audio segments that are relevant to the captions and run the environment in a distributed or centralized manner as a dedicated environment or a service environment.

The captions are extracted from any video and audio broadcast (TV or Internet) and inserted into a database that allows for alerting based on WOI, searching, indexing into video and audio segments and extraction of all or partial audio from the video broadcast. There is a limited amount of bandwidth available on mobile devices, and lower speed networked connection, and this invention will deliver to lower speed devices the alerts in increasing bandwidth via SMS messaging, email alerts, audio alerts, video alerts and any combination thereof with links back to any and all aspects of the WOI. Additionally, there are places and locations where streaming video is not appropriate, be it a bandwidth limitation or surroundings (e.g., meetings, formal occasions) would not make it socially acceptable or simply because listening and viewing may not be possible but reading would be perfectly normal and socially acceptable.

Embedded Software

The present invention further provides for a software program or System on a Chip (SOC) application that resides on a computational device at the end-user's home, or at the broadcaster's premise or at a shared facility or service—such as Amazon's C3 and S3 network (“Cloud”)—that will monitor recorded TV programs, in progress TV programs, Internet based Videos and streaming videos and recordings and extract the closed captions (CC) on a configurable basis; e.g., every N seconds, minutes or hours. The captions are retained on the user's device, pushed to the Cloud (or any virtualized system) and/or both.

Preferably, the systems and methods of the present invention to collect and configure a personal dossier or clip comprised of one or more fragments from the words of interest from the captions and the extracted and configured CC. In one embodiment, the method steps preferably include at least the following steps: extracting caption fragments from a broadcast; correctly sequencing the caption fragments by matching fragment overlaps; eliminating redundancies; assembling the caption fragments into a single transcript; thereby providing a more complete captions transcript from fragmented captions transcripts.

“Stitching” or assembling submitted video and/or audio segments from various channels based on user interest—WOI or concepts—into a single or multiple segments based on rules established by the application or the user in a personal dossier or clip and allowing users to browse the various assembled dossiers private or publicly shared

Delivering the stitched video and/or audio segments to a un-tethered or tethered device such as phone, TV, PC, radio, etc. The segments can then be shared using one or more of the available sharing platforms such as iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, etc. in a public or private channel

Enabling feedback and rating of a segment or group of segments for the purpose of ranking, augmenting or correcting the content by human or automated means

Analyzing and providing real-time or near real-time feedback to the broadcaster or copyright owner of the content about usage, consumption and interest about the WOI or concepts being broadcast thereby enabling the content owner or broadcaster to better target various content to participating audiences

Developing a SOC to accomplish the above [40-44] and enabling it on PVRs, PCs, TVs, radios, phones and other electronic devices

In a preferred embodiment, a software extension, SOC or plug-in (to a web browser or an application) is incorporated in a audio or audio-visual device or is provided through ‘add-on’ devices in networked Digital Video Recorders (DVR) or Personal Video Recorders (PVR) systems—such as TiVo, Windows MCE or any of the Cable or Telephony based network DVR and PVR systems, or a TV, mobile Telephone, standalone dedicated device, web browser or computer application. This extension would enable the user to extract the CC on a configurable basis; e.g., every n seconds, minutes or hours. The captions are retained on the user's end device or pushed into the Cloud or both in order to leverage the additional enhanced features of the entire environment.

In one embodiment of the present invention, a software program extracts captions of various recording formats of various commercially available TV Tuners formats, such as Microsoft's, ATI's, SnapStream, SageTV, etc. TV tuners located in an end user's home or a cloud configuration that tune the desired channels and record the programs of interest to the end-user. Tuners are available in many forms and tune un-encrypted and encrypted channels both in digital and non-digital formats, either in stand-alone mode or added to a standard PC interface. The present invention systems and methods further include at least one database that is capable of handling a large stream of incoming captions from multiple sources and segmenting the data access rights based on various parameters such as but not limited to: personal channels, licensed channels, free public channels, private channels, etc.

While there are both open source and licensed systems that deliver one or more aspects of this capability, none allow for a very large scale deployment (hundreds or thousands of channels from any source around the world in any language) in a distributed or centralized manner using the same components in a near real-time manner. All components of the application or service can run on a single system or many systems but appear as a single system or service.

Any Voice/Speech

The extraction of the captions would occur in for any transmission of voice or speech, including audio-only broadcasts such as radio-type over the air, on the Internet or any connected network broadcasts utilizing text to speech methods. The term “voice broadcast” is used herein to include any transmission, whether audio-visual or audio alone, that broadcast voice or speech, on any medium.

Advertisement Tag Code

The present invention provides systems and methods to encode and embed a stream of bits that represent an Advertisement Tag Code (ATC) for providing automatic electronic methods for collecting data about at least one ATC and correlate collected data with additional sources of data. Benefits of methods and system of the present invention for applications in advertising include providing a campaign manager capability to monitor automatically and electronically the effectiveness of a particular advertising campaign and to correlate such campaign with traditional print media and internet media, mobile media campaigns. The ATC is placed in the VBI or closed captioned stream of a broadcast TV channel, or in a live Internet video stream. The ATC need not be inserted in advertisements only, but in any type of broadcast such as a news broadcast or comedy shows. The ATC may be encrypted or un-encrypted, visible to the viewer (such as a QRcode or other code) or invisible the user but recognizable by the automated systems, such as unique images, patterns, and the like.

The systems and methods of the present invention include at least one advertisement tag code (ATC) for electronically marking an advertisement. Preferably, the ATC is provided at more than one point in the data stream for a video advertisement, including once at the beginning of an advertisement, or a begin tag, and also at the end of an advertisement, or an end tag. The ATC may be either ‘open’ or ‘encrypted’ and preferably includes an amount of information associated with predetermined factors, including anything that an advertiser or broadcaster wishes to capture including but not limited to an advertisement label, an intended advertisement market target, a demographic target, a television (TV) program, a time of advertisement, and a code, such as a general code or a proprietary code operable to link the advertisement to a promotional campaign that is correspondingly linked to the advertisement. A software application operable to collect data and generate the at least one tag, and for extracting the at least one tag, is provided within the system of the present invention. Preferably, an interactive website with graphic user interface is provided for systems and methods of the present invention to allow a multiplicity of users to register for a web-based service for providing methods for automated data stream ATC tagging. More particularly, registered users who have activated accounts via the interactive website platform indicate or select and describe at least one advertising campaign for monitoring.

Within the context of the system and methods of the present invention, an advertisement agency or entity creating the advertisement (advertising users) provide and include an encoded or un-encoded stream of bits (or tag) in the beginning and end of every advertisement using the closed captioned technologies available today. The ATC or tag code includes any desired information that the advertiser wishes to encapsulate in the data. For example: that the advertisement played on a particular region/channel/time slot/day/ and that it played for a particular amount of time.

A set of TV tuners or computing devices (in the event the ATCs are being monitored on the Internet by computers) would be located in target locations that will tune into the desired channels that the product managers wish to monitor and record the programs continuously based on an algorithm that is driven by the central service where and in near real-time, harvest the coded messages and update a data base or repository, central or distributed, with the desired information

Other Features

The software operable on the interactive web platform or software operable on a remote computer device further include algorithms in the cloud platform or on the end user's computing device that are operable for the following functions: capture the end user profile and preferences with regards to WOI, modality of alerts, summarization levels of the CC and system housekeeping such as retention of recorded videos and audios; format the incoming stream of captions to a more user friendly and human readable format in any of the CC languages—captions are not assumed to be English only—and to use various dictionaries to properly format proper names, places, currencies, etc.; alert the user based on any existing or future modality of interest such as mobile device, a computing device of any type, a browser plug-in, an RSS Reader of any type, a toolbar add-on to a browser of any kind or an operating system feature capable of accepting one or more of the above modalities.

The present invention system and methods further include an indexing capability that is capable of searching based on a variety of levels ranging from simple keywords, phrases, proximity of words, concepts, facets or ontological searches based on any publicly or privately available ontology; and a summarizer that is operable for summarizing the full transcript of captions from a specific recording or partial captions of a specific recording at a varying degree of summarization ranging from 1% to 99% of the text—with zero and 100 percent being no summary is necessary; a facility that is capable of detecting and accordingly handling duplicate entries (e.g., same broadcast exists but is being re-broadcast at a different time or different channel) into the database, ‘garbage’ (sometimes captions are garbled at the source and due to transmission issues), offensive words (defined by the service or the end user or both); a facility that is capable of standardizing and detecting recording times across national and international boundaries in order to be able to retrieve and present the correct results for queries into the CC database that will span multiple channels and multiple time-zones. This facility also allows the service or application to integrate and ‘mash-up’ such information with a query across all indexed information from commercial search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, Twitter, FaceBook and the like. The facility that is able to extract a segment, or all of the audio of a TV recording, that matches the segment in the extracted CC where the WOI occurred. The audio or video segments can be in one or more popular formats (e.g., mp3, mpeg) and can be optionally (based on the user profile) combined into a single ‘clip’ or multiple ‘clips’, downloaded to a mobile device (e.g., iPhone or iPod Touch), integrated with a personal media library (e.g., iTunes), or retained at the end-user's premise or in the Cloud for future retrieval.

Furthermore, software of the present invention includes algorithms for generating analytics from the stored captions to answer questions such as: what is being recorded, what is being searched, what modalities of alerts users are choosing, ‘hot topics’ of the day, month or year, etc.; also, including algorithms operable for providing detailed information of advertisement placements in a TV or Internet broadcast and provide a capability to back to the advertisement sponsor to link the advertisement placement to the effectiveness of their promotion campaigns on TV, Internet and other promotion campaigns; and optionally including algorithms that enable comparison of competitive advertisement placement campaigns to answer questions such as, by way of example and not limitation: Where is Fidelity (or Schwab or E*Trade) advertising? What Shows? What Times? What Channels? How many? Preferably, the software also includes algorithms operable for detecting whether advertisements were ‘clipped’ or shortened is provided for verifying the length of the advertisement with the ‘Begin’ and End Tags of the advertisement ATC.

Regarding system operation and methods thereof, the present invention includes operating at a computing device of an end user for the following: installing a CC client software on the remote computing device of the end user; the software operable for automatically executing actions based upon selections input by the end user through input device(s) associated with the remote computing device, preferably via an interactive graphic user interface that is accessible via the web or other network; a cloud platform including a destination for captions, selectable or designatable by the end user; a database for storage of extracted captions, either in memory on the remote computing device, on the cloud platform, on removable memory device(s), or other data storage device or system; wherein the software application runs or operates automatically as a background task on the remote computer device for always monitoring a recording folder for new recordings; and combinations of these functions and/or components.

Additionally or alternatively, the present invention provides for systems and methods operable from any networked device, providing for end user operation for the following: logon to a service or Internet site and register the KOI and alert preferences; browse alerts; search on KOI; display full, summary or clipping of transcript where the KOI occurred; and combinations thereof.

Regarding back-end service operation for systems and methods of the present invention, the following functions are provided for set-up: set-up for TV tuners; connect tuners to TV and Internet providers, in particular, as an option for centrally recorded channels; set-up for software and system components on a centralized or distributed group of computing and storage devices; set-up for network connectivity; and combinations thereof.

FIG. 1 illustrates a schematic of the present invention systems and methods, generally described as 100. The shaded parts of the diagram are external to the environment. Either a public or private network distribution mechanism is operable for the present invention. An execution computing device 10 is shown operable on a computer with TV tuners for functioning to capture video, extract & post captions to CC service 30, whether cloud caption or other service. The mechanism provides a TV tuner part of this environment, and a card inside a PC or tuner external to a PC, software monitors recordings, between about 10-30 seconds, and user configurable for any length of time, looks for new recordings, identifies recordings and captions corresponding thereto. Over time the software is able to delete recordings to conserve storage space. Once posted to the cloud or virtualized system, then the CC service components are orchestrated to store, search, alerted, summarize, etc. The link does not need to be an Internet link, since the entire system can be deployed in one box or in a distributed manner across many systems.

Once at the cloud level or virtualized system, the system includes an arrangement that is distributed on one or more machines to scale. A collector captures the CC (not shown) and saves in a database. A service bus allows any system component to communicate and interact with any other component in the system or service, e.g., summarizer can look for what is complete, alerter looks for profiles from users, and posts to alerting distribution module, etc., after confirming that it meets client profile, then provides a notice to client about what is recorded from shows or advertisements or other video being monitored. In this embodiment, the search capability is built into the database but can be a separate index engine that resides either locally or another host even external to the entire service and is constantly indexing the database for new information. A formatter (raw text captions come in all uppercase with an average of 5-6 words per line, prior art) attempts to format what is being said, so that it provides a more human readable text in free-form format. The harvester's role is for targeting companies, e.g., interested in product advertising, to respond or answer the question of “who else is saying anything at this time related to this product?” The system and methods of the present invention operate to harvest all data being said or communicated on the WOI, and link the data to the point of interest (e.g., search engine results, social media sites and the like to determine if product being mentioned anywhere else, public or private resources). Significantly, the systems and methods of the present invention provide for automated analysis of the data including the WOI, wherein the analysis includes linking the target mention results to other social media and digital media target mention results. More preferably, the analysis and automated linking of the target mention results to social media is applied for a predetermined time period. In this manner, correlation of the impact or value of the target mention results to response by an audience within a predetermined time and/or geography is provided. Thus, the present invention provides social monitoring and assessment of target mention results, for example in advertising or promotion of goods or services; a graphic user interface or dashboard display may be provided to facilitate comparisons and metrics for the analysis between the data including the WOI and the social media activity and/or response. By way of example and not limitation, social media includes web-based sites for groups, such as Facebook, Twitter, and combinations thereof. Metrics are generated by the cloud-based analysis of the data to determine how people relate to the target mention results, such as for example with advertising, in particular the analysis and metrics review related tweets or twitter feeds and Facebook or social media text-based commentary with respect to time and content that was broadcast. Advantageously, since all CC are time-stamped and date-stamped, the systems and methods provide for real-time analysis. Harvesting twitter feeds or tweets and retweets with respect to a content or a subject or WOI provides for analysis of distribution over time, data, and count (such as the number of tweets, retweets, etc. or social media mention)

The ATCs analytics database is including tags or currently captioned commercials, to allow the analytics engine to determine how many times a company is advertising on a specific channel, time, which company is advertising on what stations and show, etc. A capability of the analytics and alerting feature is to monitor, for example, if an ad is mentioned and a product manager is interested in knowing a potential impact of the ad with an analysis of web site traffic, links to the company's website, links to social media sites and analyze data to establish any correlation between who is acting on the information being advertised. Preferably, the data is collected at the start of an advertising campaign and analysis used to determine the effectiveness of the advertising campaign based upon the social media activity correlating in time with the WOI or target mention results. Additionally, a comparison with similar WOI in connection with competitive businesses may be provided with the analysis. Also, in the case of Twitter or tweet analysis, retweets may be weighted over original tweets since they amplify the impact or message propagation through that social media data. An automated survey application may be further included for additional data to be used with the social media data to consider impact of the advertisement, WOI, and/or target mention results.

The present invention preferably functions and is operable in a DVR 40 and/or TV environment 50, as well as any computing device operable for video functions and capable of processing the embedded captions in a video broadcast.

FIG. 2 is another schematic of an example embodiment of the present invention, demonstrating four local machines 10, including mobile local machines, capturing and extracting captions and posting the extracted captions to a CloudCaptioned Service operating in a computing cloud.

In a preferred embodiment of the present invention, every part of a transcript is stored in the database. An email is forwarded to each subscriber according to the preferences for monitoring established by the subscriber and authorized by the system. Data is retained in a database to enable additional deeper analytics for the purpose of business intelligence and creating decision support systems

The functions available remotely by the subscribers include: to browse and search transcripts; including delimiters such as, by way of example and not limitation, the date range, any words, all words, exact phrase, etc. as illustrated in the screen shot of FIG. 3. Preferably, the system provides access for the subscriber to review, preview, or see clippings or portions of transcripts, or entire transcripts. A search can pull the sample where the search text occurs embedded in the captions. It can expand the content in portions, including some additional data, but not full transcript, or the entire transcript. As set forth herein, the subscriber registers with the system to subscribe to keywords to monitor, and receives an alert when it occurs; preferably, then a portion is provided, more than the alert; and then the option to see the full transcript if entitled, and pay the content owner, as appropriate.

The systems and methods of the present invention also provide for a tag database for advertisements, to include sounds, not just words. E.g., Aflac advertisement might include “aflaaaac” the sound and not simply the words. Such capability enables the execution environment to recognize intended advertisements or special tags without captions being present in the broadcast. Then the system monitors shows or advertisement on every show where the subscriber or advertisers advertises and at what time the advertisement occurs. A preview of the subscription to show results is provided automatically.

Also, preferably, an option under the graphic user interface of the interactive website portal provides the option for selecting an output format as a spreadsheet for date, time, network, and show, which allows a subscriber to quickly create macros for analytics to pivot around data. Additionally, as set forth hereinabove, the output format may further include a dashboard or other GUI for presenting the data as well as analysis thereof, including linking to live or archived social media content from the likes of Facebook or Twitter.

Thus, the present invention includes a method for finding and accessing desired audio content from audio content sources. The method steps include providing a server with a processing unit, the server is constructed, configured and coupled to enable communication over a network; the server provides for user interconnection with the server over the network using a computing device positioned remotely from the server; the server and personal computer running non-transitory computer-readable storage media with executable programs stored thereon; the personal computer monitoring a broadcast, the broadcast being any voice broadcast; the executable programs extracting captions from a broadcast in near real-time; aggregating the captions in a database; indexing the database content; searching the captions for a mention of at least one target text, herein termed a target mention; analyzing the results for desired content; indexing into the database to extract the desired content; thereby providing a method for quickly finding and accessing desired audio content from a large number of sources.

The method preferably further includes a local machine running a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium with an executable program stored thereon; the executable programs extracting the captions. The captions can be aggregated in one location or in a cloud computing system. The local machine's executable programs can be a system on a chip application.

The method further includes analyses for determining the earned media and paid media of the at least one target and categorizing the at least one target mentions into positive, negative, neutral and unknown categories. The target mention results can be linked to other social media and digital media target mention results, and therefore provide for social monitoring through social media usage. Preferably, the retrieved captions are retrieved from media selected from the group consisting of audio and/or video media.

Another method according to the present invention is a method for managing communication through mass media; the method steps include monitoring for target mentions; categorizing the target mentions into positive, negative, neutral and unknown categories; linking the target mentions in real-time to determine whether such mentions trigger a spike in social media; visualizing the results and analyzing for trends; responding to the media with interest with measured response based on the results; measuring the impact of the response; thereby managing communication through mass media to increase mentions of a target. The mass media communication can be managed for different purposes, including public relations and brand management.

A method for preventing invalid captions from being submitted to a closed caption database includes the method steps of authorizing and authenticating linked devices; extracting captions from authenticated linked devices; thus preventing the submission of captions that are not part of the broadcast. These method steps include at least the steps of: authorizing devices, authenticating linked devices; extracting captions from authenticated linked devices; and preventing the submission of captions that are not part of the broadcast. Security and authentication are provided by private keys, shared keys, steganography and other methods including a secret code that the server sends to each device, which code must be included with any uploaded caption segment, and combinations thereof.

A method for extracting complete captions from fragmented audio or video captions includes the steps of extracting caption fragments from a broadcast; correctly sequencing the caption fragments by matching fragment overlaps; eliminating redundancies; assembling the caption fragments into a single transcript; thereby providing a more complete captions transcript from fragmented captions transcripts.

A system for extracting audio captions according to the present invention thus includes a server with a processing unit, a database, and a local machine tuned to at least one broadcast; the server constructed, configured and coupled to enable communication over a network; the server and database and the server and local machine interconnected over the network; the server and local machine running non-transitory computer-readable storage media with executable programs stored thereon; the executable programs of the local machine extracting captions from the broadcast and transmitting them to the server; the server executable programs storing, indexing and retrieving the captions in and from the database; thereby providing a system for local extraction of audio captions from a broadcast.

FIGS. 3-12 illustrate screen shots of various graphic user interfaces for an interactive website according to one embodiment of the present invention. The various screen shots of website graphic user interfaces show options for selecting search or browse transcripts, search all words/any words/exact phrase, date range, shows to search, etc. Importantly, with the present invention systems and methods, it is provided for functionality to automatically link between real time advertising on TV and then exploring web-based searching that follows within a predetermined time. This provides for analytics that consider marketing and advertising conversion from viewers to searching online within a predetermined timeframe after it is shown on TV.

FIG. 3 shows an interface for retrieving captions for a specific show. FIG. 4 shows an interface for retrieving captions for a specific date and time for the show selected in FIG. 3. FIG. 5 shows an interface for searching shows. FIG. 6 shows the results of the query of FIG. 5. FIG. 7 shows an interface for searching for advertisements subscriptions. FIG. 8 shows the results of the query for FIG. 7, displayed in a time sequence. FIG. 9 shows the results of the query of FIG. 7, displayed by show with count, including a graph display. FIG. 10 is the graph of FIG. 9, enlarge for better visibility of details. FIG. 11 is a table and graph showing query hits and count according to channel for the search of FIG. 7. FIG. 12 is another table and graph showing query hits and count according to channel for the search of FIG. 7.

Certain modifications and improvements will occur to those skilled in the art upon a reading of the foregoing description. By way of example and not limitation, in addition to words of interest (WOI) or keywords, the present invention systems and methods include consideration of concepts associated with WOI, i.e., the concepts are considered as a context within keywords or WOI but not identical to the WOI. For example if a person is interested in conflict situations in the Middle East, a user may only specify “Middle East conflict” as WOI but the system will be capable of understanding the concept of Middle East conflict and will include fragments that discuss conflict in all the countries in the Middle East (Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Jordan and Syria and non core participants such as US, Turkey, and many other countries) without the user explicitly specifying all the countries as specific WOI. The above-mentioned examples are provided to serve the purpose of clarifying the aspects of the invention and it will be apparent to one skilled in the art that they do not serve to limit the scope of the invention. All modifications and improvements have been deleted herein for the sake of conciseness and readability but are properly within the scope of the present invention. 

What is claimed is:
 1. A method for extracting complete captions from fragmented audio captions, the method steps comprising: extracting caption fragments from a broadcast; correctly sequencing the caption fragments by matching fragment overlaps; eliminating redundancies; assembling the caption fragments into a single transcript; thereby providing a more complete captions transcript from fragmented captions transcripts.
 2. The method of claim 1, wherein the steps are repeated for at least two broadcasts.
 3. The method of claim 2, further comprising the steps of: aggregating the transcripts in a database; indexing the database content; searching the transcripts for a mention of at least one target, thereby creating target mention results, wherein the at least one target includes at least one keyword, at least one concept, and combinations thereof; analyzing the target mention results for desired content; indexing into the database to extract the desired content; thereby providing a method for quickly finding and accessing desired content from the broadcasts.
 4. The method of claim 1, wherein the broadcast is any voice broadcast.
 5. The method of claim 1, wherein the extraction capability is embedded in a device selected from the group consisting of a personal computer (PC), a television (TV), a personal video recorder (PVR), a digital video recorder (DVR), a system on a chip (SOC) and a mobile device.
 6. The method of claim 1, further including the step of adding at least one Advertisement Tag Code to electronically mark an advertisement or target content.
 7. The method of claim 6, wherein the at least one Advertisement Tag Code is encrypted.
 8. The method of claim 6, wherein the at least one Advertisement Tag Code is visible or invisible.
 9. The method of claim 6, wherein the at least one Advertisement Tag Code is at the beginning and at the end of the advertisement.
 10. The method of claim 6, wherein the Advertisement Tag Code is encoded in a method selected from the group consisting of VBI or closed-caption stream or live Internet video.
 11. The method of claim 1, further including the step of creating captions for un-captioned audio content.
 12. The method of claim 1, wherein a local machine is provided running a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium with at least one executable program stored thereon; the at least one executable program performing the step of extracting the caption fragments.
 13. The method of claim 3, wherein the step of analyzing further includes determining an earned media and a paid media of the at least one target.
 14. The method of claim 3, wherein the step of analyzing further includes categorizing the at least one target mentions into positive, negative, neutral and unknown categories.
 15. The method of claim 3, wherein the step of analyzing further includes linking the target mention results to other social media and digital media target mention results.
 16. The method of claim 15, wherein the step of analyzing further includes metrics comparing the target mention results to other social media and digital media target mention results.
 17. The method of claim 16, wherein the step of analyzing further includes a predetermined time.
 18. The method of claim 1, wherein the broadcast is a video broadcast.
 19. The method of claim 1, wherein the step of extracting occurs in near real-time; and further including the step of storing, indexing and retrieving the caption fragments in and from a database.
 20. The method of claim 1, further comprising the steps of: monitoring the transcripts for target mentions; categorizing the target mentions into positive, negative, neutral and unknown categories; linking the target mentions in real-time to determine whether the target mentions trigger a spike in social media or digital media; visualizing the target mention results and analyzing the target mention results for trends; responding to the social media or the digital media with interest with measured response based on the target mention results; measuring an impact of the measured response; thereby managing communication through mass media to increase the target mentions.
 21. The method of claim 5, further including: authenticating the device. 